Mobility trace content of individuals (e.g., citizens of an urban area) provides information about the individuals and their movements over time. While such information could be useful for a number of applications, heretofore it has not been possible scale this information to provide reliable information for larger areas and a greater number of included individuals, for example, as in transit passengers within a city network. Further, such information is typically limited to collaborative users who choose to share their information.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,484,148 and 9,042,908 attempt to describe the mobility of people with higher granularity using proposed classification models based on historical data for identifying the activities of individuals and the sequence of their movements between different activities. However, these models are always limited to small fractions of the population that share their personal data logs (i.e., cellular data traces) and cannot scale up to cover the entire city population or be used to facilitate efficient on-demand transportation applications. U.S. Pat. No. 6,148,199 discusses communication in a mobility database.